... but they probably won't be destroyed immediately. Like most systems, Perl is "lazy." Unreferenced items are marked for deletion but nothing actually happens until the garbage-collector makes its midnight run, banging the cans together and waking everybody up.

garbage collection
A misnamed feature--it should be called, "expecting your mo+ther to
pick up after you". Strictly speaking, Perl doesn’t do thi+s, but
it relies on a reference-counting mechanism to keep things +tidy.
However, we rarely speak strictly and will often refer to t+he
reference-counting scheme as a form of garbage collection. + (If
it’s any comfort, when your interpreter exits, a "real" gar+bage
collector runs to make sure everything is cleaned up if you+’ve been
messy with circular references and such.)

So perhaps I'm right to be concerned about cleanup... the program itself will be installed as a daemon, so anything I can do to prevent long term consumption, or to force garbage collection would be good.

What method do you recommend to remove the array? My read of delete (man page) against an array leads me to believe that I'm still waiting on true garbage collection